Proceedings Paper

The basic premise of this paper is that at some point in the future all the transmission facilities of the public (telephone) network will be fiber-optic, i.e., end-to-end fiber connectivity will be provided to each subscriber. With the advent of coherent transmission systems the available bandwidth will become enormous, and thus the question we address is: given the availability of "infinite" bandwidth to every subscriber in the relatively near future, what does this imply for the network architecture? In particular, which switching technology is best suited to providing all foreseeable voice, data and video services? Having discussed advantages and disadvantages of architectures based on different switching technologies, we conclude that an architecture based on circuit-switched, fixed-bandwidth channels for the transport of user information is the most appropriate for a network in which there are no constraints on the transmission bandwidth. The standard channel capacity should be determined by the service having the greatest bandwidth requirement.